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bluerobotics / ping-viewer

Ping Viewer is an open-source application to view and record data from the Blue Robotics Ping Echosounder and Ping360 Scanning Sonar.
https://docs.bluerobotics.com/ping-viewer/
GNU General Public License v3.0
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MacOS: enable opening multiple application instances (without terminal) #997

Closed ES-Alexander closed 2 years ago

ES-Alexander commented 2 years ago

Summary

Allow easily opening a second instance of Ping Viewer on MacOS to enable simultaneously using multiple sensors (or complete #982).

Additional information

When clicking icons in MacOS the user is taken to an existing open window if there is one. The only way to get around this (for a user) is to use terminal or a shell script that can run open --new /Applications/pingviewer.app. Would be great if there was something like a right-click option for the icon in the taskbar that enables opening a New Window like is available for Terminal and Finder and similar (unfortunately couldn't find how to do this with Qt, but I likely don't properly know what to search for/where to look).

Terminal 'New Window' right click option

Could also/instead enable this with a File/New Window (⌘ N) menubar option

chrome 'New Window' menubar option
patrickelectric commented 2 years ago

This appears more as a mac bug (or feature). From what I could search, this is a normal issue on the OS (not our falt). What you see in terminal is a "New Window" and not a "New Application". For the terminal is a simple application that manages multiple windows via a service, not opening the same application multiple times. It's indeed something that we could fix... but the OS does not help with that, and a quick investigation did not come with any solution besides some hacks around Mac OS. If the solution for our code did not come that easily, the tradeoff between investigation + fixing does not worth for now doing this task.

ES-Alexander commented 2 years ago

Fair enough. In that case we can close this in favour of #982. At least there's a terminal workaround in the interim, which is better than nothing :-)

patrickelectric commented 2 years ago

May help: https://github.com/bluerobotics/ping-viewer/pull/1046